Frank Steinmetzger posted on Mon, 23 Dec 2013 01:05:02 +0100 as excerpted: > To me it's unbelievable that there are desktops out there that don't > even let you choose another base font.
Back in 2001 when I switched to Linux instead of allowing MS their demanded remote-root ability with eXPrivacy, it was kde2 vs gnome1. I could not /believe/ that gnome didn't have a way to set desktop and widget colors -- you had to do it via setting an entire theme, and to edit one color, you had to hand-edit the config-files for that theme. Even servant-ware MS allowed /that/, but gnome didn't. For me, that was the single deciding factor. Any DE that wouldn't let you set a simple color wasn't a desktop I was interested in using! Luckily, kde was available, with its policy of user choice! =:^) But that said, I'm /extremely/ glad there's a project such as gnome around, if only because were it not there, some of those devs might get the idea of turning kde into an "our way or you're an idiot" DE, and that'd be horrible. Let each have their own playground to work and play in, and they're less likely to do damage to one of the major target points for both users and devs, of the other one. =:^) > KWin window rules are great, like “put mplayer always on top and on all > desktops”. 3D effects are not only nice (some of them anyway), but also > helpful, like seeing all open windows at once and filtering through > them. Absolutely! > Keyboard shortcuts allow for very fast interaction -- I assigned > almost the entire alphabet to some action or application via the Meta > key. And in almost every program you can assign keys to all sorts of > actions. I started out with something like that, but quickly found that I had more shortcuts I wanted to enable than keys, even with a fancy multimedia/inet keyboard with a bunch of "extra" keys! But that was back on kde3, where it was possible to setup multi-key hotkeys, and what I ended up doing was setting up a couple of the extra keys as effectively custom menu launchers, such that hitting one of them, then a second key, would launch the desired app based on the second key. Unfortunately kde4 broke that, tho apparently it was actually qt4 that didn't support the functionality that kde3/qt3 had. There's still an open bug on it[1], but while apparently it wasn't easily fixed in qt4/ kde4, I've read that the kde devs made very sure qt5 supported that functionality early on, so hopefully it'll be back with kde5. =:^) Which was one of the big issues I had with the kde4 upgrade, since it broke all my multikey hotkeys! But while trying one of several third party hotkey apps that was supposed to support multi-key (which it did, tho I found out configuration was a major pain), it suddenly occurred to me that a serially invoked single- key hotkey solution would be enough. Once I had that insight, I set right to work hacking up such a thing in bash, which I happen to know reasonably well. What I ended up with was a single kde4 hotkey assignment, triggered by one of those "extra" keys, that launched a special konsole profile, with my bash-based hotkey script in turn launched in that konsole window. That script, in turn, displays a list of options along with associated hotkeys, then takes a single key as input, which it uses to select the desired action from the list, launching that action and then disowning it so it won't close along with the launcher window. Using that script, I ended up with a three-key (or occasionally four-key) solution. The first key is the "extra" key, configured in khotkeys to launch my script with my "category" menu. There I hit a single key (g=games, c=config, p=power-control, f=file-management, etc), which reinvokes the script with the menu for that category. So say I hit g=games, I then get a menu listing all my favorite games (p=kpat, P=palapeli, kde's jigsaw puzzler, etc), where I hit a third key that actually launches the selected game. So it's <launcher><g=games><p=kpat>, in my head effectively: launch, game, patience. For the configuration category, one choice is hotkeys, which simply pops up a menu that will load the selected hotkey menu file into my favorite text editor (mcedit in a konsole window), so that one sequence is four keys deep instead of three, effectively: launch, config, hotkeys, games, to load the game menu in the editor, for instance. And I have a kwin rule setup to force that particular konsole profile to center-screen, always-on-top, specific size, so my hotkey menu always pops up in the same location at center-screen, so it doesn't interfere too much with normal "smart" window placement. The biggest down side is that it's a bash implementation, and initializing the bash script at each menu launch isn't as fast as it'd be were it natively coded. But I don't know C/C++/etc, only bash, and bash (plus the initial khotkeys launcher altho if kde were to break it like they broke my last solution with kde4, it'd be simple enough to switch that to a third party launcher, plus konsole, and the kwin rules) is enough! =:^) Which goes back to my point about kde (and gentoo, and linux) being customizable. I'm rather far from the docile "I'll take the black-box- you-give-me-and-I'll-LIKE-it!" type user that's servantware's best fit. I'm a demanding user with rather high expectations, and while kde doesn't /always/ match them, it, and linux in general, are customizable enough that even in the extreme, I still get the chance to work around the problem, with hacked up bash scripts if that's what it takes! =:^) --- [1] khotkeys4 broken multi-key support https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=161009 -- Duncan - List replies preferred. No HTML msgs. "Every nonfree program has a lord, a master -- and if you use the program, he is your master." Richard Stallman ___________________________________________________ This message is from the kde mailing list. Account management: https://mail.kde.org/mailman/listinfo/kde. Archives: http://lists.kde.org/. More info: http://www.kde.org/faq.html.
